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Cryptographer

Creates and breaks codes and encryption systems that protect digital communication.

Did you know?

Polish mathematicians first cracked Enigma in 1932. Turing and Bletchley Park broke later versions, which may have shortened the war by about two years.

How subjects help

Mathematics: Use prime numbers to build locks that are easy to close but very hard to open.
Computer Science: Write code that scrambles messages and test it for weak spots.
Physics: Explore how quantum computers could crack codes and design codes they can't.
Logic: Think like an attacker to find every possible way a code could be broken.

A famous name

Alan Turing: Led the Hut 8 team at Bletchley Park in WWII, which helped crack the German Enigma code.

Try it yourself: Make and crack a secret code

Write the alphabet. Under it, write it again shifted three places: A becomes D, B becomes E, and so on.
Encode a short message and give it to a friend with no key.
Can they crack it? Hint: try every shift, or look for the most common letter, which is often E.
Why would this code be useless for real secrets? (There are only 25 possible shifts to try.)

Cryptographers design codes that would take even the fastest computers far too long to break, and test them by trying to break them.

Also try: Debug a sandwich robot.

Known for it in

USA, UK, Israel, Switzerland, Germany